Creative business strategies in a digital age

What’s been the biggest business mistake you or your clients have made? Today we kick off a new series where experts talk candidly about where they went wrong – anonymously, of course. Our experts learned something the hard way so you don’t have to.

The first in our confessional booth today is Madeleine, who discovered she should have done a better job of educating her superiors in the health industry.Get more gooi!

Copyblogger quit Facebook a month ago. The simple reason is despite having 30,000 fans, CB got no bang for its Facebook buck. It’s a good article and I recommend reading it. The part that hit home for me:

Forced Shares: My personal brand audience on Facebook loves Copyblogger. So I did some forced shares (read: I shared Copyblogger posts I love directly to my brand page). These were eaten alive, devoured, and reshared. While a smashing result, a brand’s Facebook strategy can’t thrive on someone like me sharing every blog post(ed: emphasis mine). The posts I didn’t force share just sat there with an average of six to seven “Likes.” Ew.

When YouTube stars like PewDiePie make $4M annually, Hollywood has no choice but to pay attention.

YouTube’s biggest star PewDiePie earns an estimated $4 million annually from ad revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal. YouTube and its stars have featured prominently in the news ever since that Wall Street Journal article in June.

Hollywood is Taking YouTube Stars Seriously

Comcast, the world’s largest provider of cable services, is in the hotseat for bad customer service this week. Not surprisingly, they’re blaming the representative in question. The word is that the rep’s behavior was not consistent with how they train their representatives.

Three mystery flavors, labeled only by their numbers, were suddenly available in my supermarket.

Test flavors 404 and 2653 come in yellow and blue bags, respectively.

I had always wanted to be Nancy Drew as a child, and here were mystery chips that needed solving. (When I was a kid, it was Mystery Dum Dum lollipops). Clues could be found on the nutritional facts label as required by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), but really the only way to find out the flavor was to try them.

Would customers really buy chips when they didn’t know what they were getting into?

Here’s how Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, sweetened the deal and created lots of buzz.

You’ve probably never heard of Librize unless you live in Japan. Started in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo’s coolest neighborhood, is the brainchild of computer engineer and café owner Sho Kawamura. The project has a simple premise: to turn a bohemian area of small cafés, independent theatres and boutiques into an interactive library and community run entirely online through social networks.